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Android vs. iOS: Games and Geek AppsAndroid games don't generally suck when played on Android tablets. There are just fewer of them.

To analyze the availability of games on Android versus the iPad, I looked at 10 of the top mobile game publishers as judged by Mark Fidelman of Technorati, with one swapped out: Gameloft, EA, Rovio, ngmoco, Digital Chocolate, Firemint, Glu, Hands-On, BigFish and Namco. I swapped Namco for PopGames, which I couldn't find in the stores because it's too common a search term. And I'm not counting Gameloft titles that aren't in Google Play, because most people don't know how to download those.

The iPad wins, 402 games to 176. Now, a lot of that seems to be Big Fish spewing 166 games into the iTunes store. 166 games! But even with that outlier out of the way, the iPad still wins 236-162. There are more major-label games available for the iPad.

Of course, there are entire categories of apps found on Android tablets but not on the iPad. Real alternate Web browsers. Widgets. Classic game emulators requiring illegally obtained ROMs. BitTorrent clients. Alternative app stores.

What all of those categories have in common, though, is that they're for tweakers. Geeks. Experts. The kinds of people who are likely to be reading this article, to be sure, but not the mainstream consumer.

In other words, an Android tablet might be better for you, reader, because you want to reinstall the OS and emulate a Super Nintendo. But that can't be a general recommendation if the apps from big, popular brands generally suck.

Why Android Apps Are UglyWay too many Android apps fall back on a design that looks like a late-20th-century WAP site: a stack of modules designed to look good on narrow screens. Unfortunately, that design is completely inappropriate for a tablet.

On the iPad, on the other hand, apps tend to use multiple panes or columns, which is a much better use of tablet real estate. This is actually a Google design recommendation for tablets. Developers just aren't doing it.

Android partisans argue that Google has given developers the tools to create great tablet apps, and devs aren't using them. They're right. Using a method called "fragments," the Android SDK is perfectly capable of creating multi-format apps that look ideal on differently sized screens.

There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here for developers and users. Apple solved it, in a way, by making the iPhone app experience on iPads so bad that developers had no choice but to code for the iPad. The iPad runs iPhone apps, but not in a way in which anyone would be proud.

Most Android apps have always been resolution-independent, though, so developers and publishers could fool themselves into thinking their apps run Just Fine. They run, of course, in the sense that the code executes and they (mostly) fill the screen. So the developers stop there, able to check their "we have an Android tablet app" box. But the apps suck. Of course, it doesn't help at all that the two most-popular Android tablets, the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet, are small-screen devices running an older version of Android (2.3), which doesn't support the Fragment APIs necessary to create truly universal phone-and-tablet apps. The success of these two small tablets is actually holding back rather than advancing the cause of larger Android tablets.

For the slideshow below, I took screen shots of apps from top brands on an Asus Transformer Prime tablet running Android 4.0.3 and an iPad 2 running iOS 5.1. I tried to shoot the apps in landscape mode, but some of the Android apps forced portrait mode.

Yes, I know it's a slideshow. I know you hate slideshows. I can't think of any way to present this other than a slideshow. Go look at it. The captions are important.

The Sad Conclusion The upcoming round of Android tablets is, hardware-wise, a match for the new iPad. The Asus Transformer TF700, for instance, has a slightly lower-resolution screen (at 1920-by-1200 compared to 2048-by-1536) but a faster, more powerful CPU in Nvidia's Tegra 3. The initial model of the TF700 will lack 4G, but will include expandable memory. It can trade specs with the new iPad blow for blow.

We'll continue to rate such high-quality tablets highly. But until applications from major brands come out in not only similar number, but similar quality for Android tablets, it'll be hard for one of them to beat the iPad to our top award.

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 9 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, one of the hosts of the daily PCMag Live Web show and speaks frequently in mass media on cell-phone-related issues. His commentary has appeared on ABC, the BBC, the CBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and in newspapers from San Antonio, Texas to Edmonton, Alberta.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer, having contributed...
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